"We Are Here": Jewish Narratives of Poland's March 1968 Events

Andrzej Karpinski - Student, Warsaw

We were at the bar "U Fukiera."  In the Old Town, a whole group ofus.  It was June 1967, right after the Six Day War.  We had just taken our last exam and finished our third year of college.  The exam wasfor Prof. Kunicki-Goldfinger’s class - he was a fantastic person, head of the microbiology department at the University of Warsaw, we all really liked him.  Somebody said, “let’s drink to our boss!”  And oneof our classmates, who was drunk already, said “I don’t drink to Jews.” Prof. Kunicki-Goldfinger was ethnically Jewish.  I said to him, “You already drank to a Jew.”  He was confused - “How so?”  I said, “I’m a Jew.” 

The first time in my life I had dared to say it.  Probably under the influence of alcohol. I had a Polish name, Polish last name, a so-called “good” look, so people could say what they thought about Jews around me.  And they did.  For example, in 1964, when the Olympics were in Tokyo and Irena Kirszenstein became a superstar, a classmate of mine said “Ugh, she’s a filthy Jew.”My life story is quite strange.  I don’t know if I was a Jew then.Likely I was probably still deciding.  I had two lives.  One at school and the university, and the other at Jewish camps and a the Jewish Association club at 5 Nowogrodzka Street, where we’d go on Saturdays or Sundays for dances.  I would wait all week to go there, just like I would wait all year to go to Jewish camp.  When I was there I felt 200% Jewish. Even though, if I was a Jew at all, I was only 50%.

Once, when we came back from Jewish camp - I have two younger sisters,we probably were about 15 at the time - we came home and we started singing Jewish songs.  My father was really moved by it, he almost cried.  Suddenly his half-Gentile children are pulling him back into a world that disappeared more than 20 years earlier.  Into a Jewishness that he had pushed away from himself. 

He survived the war in Poland and he didn’t want to be a Jew.  He had a “good” look, and that meant he had a chance to survive the war in Poland.  Green eyes,short hair that was almost blonde, a slightly scooped nose, and he was smart enough to play dumb.  I don’t remember him ever saying about himself that he was a Jew.  The word “Jew” was a taboo for him.  He told us that before the war, he was the best in his school at reciting poems by Mickiewicz, Slowacki, he knew Tuwim’s poetry extremely well,and he even went to Catholic religion classes out of curiosity.  He knew the Bible better than his Polish friends.After the war, he kept his adopted name and last name.  He was Jan, not Emmanuel.  And he was always afraid that someone would start to suspect that he was a Jew.

On the other hand, my mother was a Gentile who went to classes at ORT, sat in the first row, and didn’t worry whether anyone was going to treat her like a Jew.   ORT was an international network of vocational schools where, at the end of the 50s and early 60s, Jews, especially Jews repatriated from Russia, would study to be tailors, cobblers, electricians and make some money.  My mother studied to be a seamstress.

In March ’68, I didn’t suffer.  My father didn’t get fired from his job; he still worked in the Central Technical Organization, and they didn’t throw me out of school.  My classmates behaved more or less appropriately.  Everything went normally, more or less.  I was studying biology. In February, a new semester started. And new classes - political science.  Specifically on March 9, on a Saturday [the day after the first major student protest at the University of Warsaw].  Complete coincidence. 

Some university docent came to class and asked: “What do you think about the things that are happening at the University?”  The day before had been the first protest.  “You can speak honestly,” he said.  There were about one hundred, one hundred-fifty people in the lecture hall.  And they began to speak “honestly,” “openly” - the Zionists are worse than the fascists and the Nazis, they want to destroy the People’s Republic of Poland.  I felt ambushed - like my classmates, some of whom I was close with, were against me.  I started to fear them.  In April, I got a note from the dean’s office that I had received an educational stipend.  I was the best student in my year - I was offered a teaching assistant position in the department and there was talk of putting me on a doctoral track.  A few days later, I talked to a professor whom I really respected and who seemed to be a decent person.  He said to me: “There are too many Jews in high-ranking positions.”  I thought to my self, “That’s me too - after I get my degree and defend my dissertation, which I planned to do - I’ll be in some position and have a career, even if it’s a minor one.”

All of a sudden, one of my classmates from school was very interested in my and my family.  He was a poor student.  Maybe he was acting as an informant.  He warned me, “Andrzej, don’t speak up about any political topics around me.”  I don’t whether he was trying to be honest with me or he was afraid for himself, that someone else would hear my say something and then criticize him that he was not passing on information. Suddenly, my friends from Jewish camp and the Jewish Associations tarted to disappear.  A sort of herd mentality took over.  People were thinking that if they didn’t go right now, in six months they might not let
them leave.  And they would be left behind, alone, in a social vacuum.

For me the final decision came in August 1968, with the invasion of Czechoslovakia.  Until this point my father had still held onto some threads of hope that the system was not completely bad,but this turned his world upside down as well.It’s not surprising that a person who survived the Holocaust in Poland is, in a certain sense egotistical, sees only himself.  His physical and psychological existence was destroyed.  And in the end he was afraid only for himself and those closest to him.  Despite the fact the he really didn’t want to leave, he decided to emigrate.

I had only a few months left to finish my studies - it was my fifth year.  At home, I said, “Let’s go - tomorrow, even.  At the end of August we put in our paperwork.  My mother decided that we would go to Israel.  If we were going to leave, then we should go home, to people like us.  And she was right.  She subconsciously sensed that this would be the best resolution for her children.  That in Israel it might be better or worse, but at least no one would be singling us out that we are this or that  - do you understand?

So you took the 4:29 train from Gdansk Station?

No, my dear - the 7:05 - to Vienna.  There were four of us - my parents, me, my sister.  My other sister stayed with her husband, and they were supposed to join us after six months.  At the station there were about 200, maybe 300 people.  Friends, colleagues, my mother’s whole family.  My father was really crying.  My mother’s Polish family had become his family.  He had lost his own family in the war.  He understood that most of them he would never see again.  And he didn’t.

I was in a strange mood, like I was drunk.  Some of my friends told me they were jealous.  I couldn’t understand what they were jealous of. The Poles were jealous of the chance we had been given.  But I didn’t view our departure as a “chance.”

We had hand luggage and four big suitcases to carry our life’s work - total cretinism.  We were only allowed to take personal items and the most basic goods - for example, one teapot, one coffee service for 12 people.  My mother bought two teapots and two six-person services and she had to hide one in the heavy luggage and another in a suitcase.  A total low point.  My father was afraid that they would check our luggage, discover the contraband, and on account of an extra teapot they would not let us leave Poland.

I sobered up a bit in Vienna.  Suddenly at the break of dawn I found myself in the West.  It was terribly cold, -20 C.  On the platform waiting for us were some friends who had left a month earlier than us along with some old Viennese people.  They invited us to breakfast at the restaurant in the station - fresh buns, butter, coffee.  After another five days we found ourselves in Israel.  It was my first time on a plane.  January 3, 1968 we left Warsaw and we were in Israel just before midnight on January 8.

We landed.  Suddenly from -20 degrees, we landed and it’s plus 15.  We were wearing heavy winter coats, carrying and wearing all our belongings.  It was terribly hot.  They called out to my father: “Do you speak Yiddish?”  Yes.  My father took care of all the formalities. At that time the Labor Party was in power in Israel and no one checked who was or wasn’t a Jew.  My father said we were all Jews and we all automatically got “kosher” documents, including my mother, who was administratively converted into a Jew.  Which helped them for the rest of their lives in Israel.

My mother also happened to have a good maiden name, which didn’t sound totally Polish but was perfect for Israel, and when someone asked her where she spent the war, she would just say she wandered around the forests and didn’t remember anything.

Immediately at the airport they asked my father where he wanted to get an apartment.  He said in Tel Aviv, because all of his friends lived there.  The man said - we have a great one, five minutes from downtown, five minutes from the ocean.  And really, it couldn’t’ have been better.  They took us to a hotel.  We didn’t sleep all night. Some people were singing Zionist (at least I thought at the time) songs and we Gentiles had no chance to sleep.  In the morning they took us to Herzliyah, 15 kilometers north of Tel Aviv.  My parents went to the office and my sister and I waited out on the street.

Suddenly someone came up, looked at me and said “Andrzej Karpinski?” I was shocked - 10 hours in a foreign country and someone recognizes me on the street.  That never happens anywhere.  He said, “I know you from camp in Poland, 1963.”  I didn’t remember him but it didn’t matter.  He knew who I was.  I wasn’t a foreigner anymore.

We went to our apartment.  Three rooms.  Not bad - we moved from a three-room apartment in Warsaw to a three-bedroom apartment in Herzliyah.  It was empty, nothing in it - not even a light.  After an hour there was a knock at the door.  We got four beds, four blankets, and a little burner for heating water.  Another knock on the door. Some people were at the door saying they heard there was a family that had come from Poland, and asking what they could do to help.  Every so often someone new would come in and bring something - a cup, a spoon.

My father looked up the address of an acquaintance who lived in the same area.  We had to go visit her.  Outside it was 20 degrees Celsius, and we were still in our heavy winter coats.  A woman started talking to my father in Hebrew.  He said he didn’t understand, and she switched to Yiddish. She asked “When did you get here?  Do you have any money?”  My father said, “Of course, they gave us 50 pounds” and he showed her.  50 pounds then was about 20-30 dollars.  We thought we were rich.  She said “Listen, that’s not much, and where you’re going is far, take a cab.”  My father said “no, no, we’ll walk.”

You see, he had some money, but he was afraid to spend it.  And then this woman, a complete stranger, poorly dressed, gives my father 10 pounds for a taxi and says “Take it.”  My father was touched and he asked “And who should I pay it back to.”  And the woman said “The person who is arriving today.”

Sorry, I’m getting a little choked up.  Even after forty years, it still touches me.

So you felt at home?

Yes, that I was really at home.  The first day.

But that’s not the end of the story.  We got to my father’s friend’s house, and she calls a second friend and says “someone’s here, but I’m not going to tell you who,” and she hands the phone to my father.  My father starts talking “Hello, hello, what’s up, blah blah blah,” and the woman calls out “Emil!”  It was his friend from school - after thirty years she recognized him by his voice.  Unbelievable.

My sister and I got sent to a kibbutz for language lessons.  It seemed like some kind of terrible social degradation.  What?  We noble Poles, almost academics, are supposed to work on a communist kibbutz?  They were pushing me to pick grapefruits and oranges.  In my group there were four guys from Poland.   We rebelled and started a strike.  Of course, we were made for greater things.  Others had it even worse - they sent them to clean the bathrooms.  They didn’t study in Poland so that they could go clean toilets!  They actually made out better than us.  They finished cleaning and got to go swimming.  While we had to work four hours.

We would work for four hours, and then study Hebrew for four hours. We’d take the book and turn it over ten times looking for some kind of symbol that would let us figure out where the beginning was and where the end was.

We got a little money each month.  There was a little store where everyone had a credit.  But if you wanted kogiel mogiel you could make it with fifteen eggs and no one would bat an eye, no one really paid attention to the budget.  We had everything.  Everyone had what they needed.

It was like camp.  Friends from Poland, Polish girls, joyful, fun.  We still stick together to this day, extremely close - those six months left their mark on us for life.

After six months they sent me to study.  I had to make up two years. It was a huge effort and I also had to learn English.  I recorded the lectures on a tape recorder, and then at night I would copy them out, even the jokes that the professor would tell, which I didn’t understand.  My roommate, an Israeli, was extremely dedicated and he would sit up all night with me and explain, word by word.  I finished my studies thanks to him and two Polish girls, who had been in Israel since 1957.

After six months, my father got a job.  All of a sudden he was a “sir.”  On a month’s pay he could travel around the world.  That pseudo-success was his misfortune - it didn’t match his worldview.  How is it that children in a "capitalist" country got stipends, room & board, finished their studies? And they were happy.  That didn’t sit well with him.

Before the war he had wanted to become a veterinarian but he couldn’t. There was the numerus clausus [limitation of Jewish enrollment in universities] and his family was poor.  “You can’t imagine,” he would tell us, “the poverty in pre-war Poland.”  And that before the war he could not have had three children getting higher educations.  He was constantly comparing “pre-war” and “post-war.”  He always had a picture of pre-war Poland in his mind.  If someone pointed out that Denmark, Greece or Spain were also poor before the war, but then they made a major leap forward after the war, he wouldn’t pay that any mind.

But he was very pragmatic.  He wasn’t a moron.  He was even able to admit at time: “I’m politically bankrupt.  Everything I built in my whole life is a big joke.”  Because he did build something.  He wasn’t a higher-up, but he was there.  And he took part in building that system.

As far as the Party, he may have given up earlier than we realized. Although he was a member until the end of his life.  He didn’t have the strength to resign.  But at Party meetings he would sit in the back rows.  He sat in the back so he wouldn’t be seen.  And he wouldn’t speak up.

For the last thirty-plus years he was in Israel, which for him was a distant and foreign country.  At times he could act somewhat arrogant. In Israel you call every one “ty” [informal] because there is no other form of address, but he didn’t let anyone call him “ty.”  He was “Pan [Mister] Jan.” And when my mother would call him at work his boss, who spoke Polish, would call out “Mister Jan, there’s a call for you.”  Everyone thought his name was not “Mr. Jan” but “PanieJanie” because that’s what they heard the boss call him.  So they would say “PanieJanie is sick,” “PanieJanie is on a call,” etc. 

To the very end he never learned Hebrew, which led to some humorous situations.  I would come from Germany to read him official papers that he would receive.  My mother didn’t learn Hebrew either.  That was a big mistake.  You can’t live in a country where you can’t get by in the local language.  But they had a large group of friends.  From that original group of people who came by with cups and spoons there developed a group of friends that was a like a family to them.  People would come to my mother for dumplings and stuffed cabbages, and the whole neighborhood knew she made terrific borscht.

After three years in Israel I went for a year to France, and then I got a job at a university in Geneva.  At work I had a friend from Poland who, by chance, had the same last name as me.  She invited me into her quite snobbish group of friends and introduced me with my last name.  They asked: “Your cousin?”  Quickly, before she could answer, I said “yes.”  They asked “are you from Poznan too then?” “No,” I said, “from Jerusalem.”  Probably the worst thing I could have done.  Having a Jew for a cousin is not looked upon kindly in Polish families. Maybe I harmed her reputation a bit.

After another three years, completely coincidentally, I moved to Germany.  I went there for two weeks, met my wife, got a job.  We put in an application to emigrate to Canada, because if you’re going to leave Israel, better to go to another immigrant country.  But we thought the better of it - we both had jobs and we didn’t want to go through the process again of knocking everything down and starting over.  It’s hard to start from scratch - how many times can you do it?  I knew Hebrew, French, German - enough.

In 1983 I became a German citizen and the first thing we wanted to do was go to Poland.  See how it was.  Poland was like the forbidden fruit.  My wife had emigrated in 1965, so she had not been there for 18 years, and I hadn’t been there in 14.  We missed the Poland we had left behind  Something that didn’t exist anymore, couldn’t exist anymore.

We had to apply for visas.  We got a response from the consulate that we needed to prove we had an appropriate attitude to the Polish government.  I was really furious.  We could go to Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, wherever we wanted.  Except that the very place where I had spent my life - I wasn’t allowed to go there.  I wrote a rather sharp letter that if the consul was interested in my past, he should call Warsaw and they could give him more information about me than I could about myself.  The woman at the consulate was offended.  She told me that if I was going to write letters like that, the consul was going to get angry and wouldn’t let me into Poland at all.  So I said: “by all means, then I’ll write a list to Strauss about German citizens are being discriminated against based on their heritage.”  Franz Jozef Strauss[1]was Poland’s favorite German at the time, he was bringing money into Poland.  I got my visa in five minutes.  The very graciously allowed me to enter as a foreign tourist, obligated to exchange at least seven dollars each day.  We drove there in a car.

I looked like I do now.  It seemed to me that I blended in on the streets of Warsaw, but people were coming up to me whispering “money, money.”  I asked my friend who I had studied with and who stayed in Poland, I said : “listen, this is a strange story but there’s a hundred people around me and all they are asking is whether I have cash, what’s going on?”  She said “Because you - starting with your teeth - have a different look, different faces.  Your faces look satisfied, they don’t show the signs of day to day problems. Even your wrinkles look different, they don’t show sadness.” That was a unique experience for me.

I met with friends, my mother’s family, it was very joyful, I satisfied that longing.  The next time I went was in 1990.  Also by car.  There were five of us - my wife and I, our son, and two friends.  My family had a single family passport.  At the border I gave it to the woman and … shock - she didn’t even look at it.  I stopped being homesick - if I have a few free days, I just go. 

My father went too - he had a less happy experience.  He loved Warsaw, he wanted to take it all in, so he got on the first cable car and rode from one end to the other and back again.  A woman started speaking to him in a friendly way: “Sir, you should get a discounted ticket, for seniors.”  He was 85 then.  “No, no, it’s fine.”  “Are you from overseas?” she asked.  “Yes.”  “From where?” “Australia.”  My father was afraid to say that he was from Israel.  And then she asked “How long have you been overseas,” and he told her 35 years.  She was impressed - “You speak Polish beautifully.”  And he wanted to show off his good manners as well and so he told her “And you, ma’am, speak in a particularly intellectual way.”  To which she replied:  “There’s nothing left of the intellectuals in Poland because the Jews destroyed our entire intelligentsia.” 

You see - not Russians or Germans, but the Jews.  My father was in shock. 

My mother was bolder, but she still would not admit on the street that she was from Israel.  She liked everything about Poland, she talked to people, she was enthusiastic about Poland, but when the question came where she was from, she said she was from America or Australia. 

And when they ask me if I am from Warsaw, I say: No, Tel Aviv.  At the beginning it was a bit shameful.  The conversation would die out.  But lately, you know - nothing.  No reaction.

I went with my wife to the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto.  My wife is from Lodz.  There were a few thousand people there, a large number of scouts. They were helping with first aid, taking care of older people.  I watched them and I was moved.  There were no people like that in 1968.  It’s a shame.  But it’s good that they are there now.  There will be more and more of them.

I’ve lived in Germany over 30 years.  Life here is good, I have a German passport, I live in good conditions, but I am not a part of German society.  I don’t want to be.  I have some kind of mental block.  Not the same as my mother in law, of course - a German Jew who was expelled from Germany and went through several camps, and when she returned to Germany several decades later went into shock when she saw a German soldier.  She didn’t want to get off the plane.  She only spoke German and yet she feared Germans.

I’m not afraid of Germans.  More than that, I think Germans are normal.  I have a lot of German acquaintances, young and older - even some who could have taken part in the war at one point.  But looking at them, I still can’t understand how things got to the point they did.

Luckily in Poland we have a pretty large group.

From Poland?

Yes, yes.

You have friends all over?

Yes - people from Cologne or Frankfurt will come visit us for coffee.  If it is my birthday or my wife’s birthday, people come from all over Germany, Switzerland, France.  It’s no problem for them to get in the car and come.  We stick together because we all have the same identity problem.  Polish Israeli Jew living in Germany or wherever, but never in one’s own home.  My son has some of the same issues.  So we are dragging it on one generation further.

[1]      A former German official and Christian Democrat leader; in the early 1980s he arranged several large loans to Eastern Bloc countries.